Taking flight

That fleet was small. India inherited a handful of Dakotas, wartime aircraft that carry about three tonnes each, and the 1947 Partition took some of them. They still flew troops, weapons and supplies to Srinagar, Poonch and Ladakh. At Poonch, villagers built

an airstrip by hand so that aircraft could land.

The pattern stayed the same in 1962, when India fought a war with China. Instead of fighters, transport aircraft were used extensively. Even to carry guns to forward places like Chushul and land at Daulat Beg Oldie, a strategic military base in northern Ladakh, transport aircraft played a major role.

“Can any other fleet do this? No. If you see the operations, they cannot be taken by somebody else,” he added.

Almost six decades later, the IAF still depends on its transports, and most of them were designed abroad. That may now change, but only in part and only if orders for the aircraft from the forces follow.

The defence ministry floated a request for proposal on August 12 for acquisition of about 60 multirole transport aircraft (MTA) to upgrade the old fleet. Bids are to be received by December 2. Mahindra Group and Brazilian multinational aerospace corporation Embraer have settled on Nagpur as the location for the final assembly line for the C-390 Millennium aircraft if the government and IAF decide on the plane.

This bid comes in the wake of Tata Advanced Systems Limited’s (TASL)  support for the competing Lockheed Martin’s C-130J. Both the bids will prove if India can progress from assembling foreign-designed aircraft to manufacturing components. TASL is developing C295 at Vadodara.

“The C-130J-30 is best suited for the Indian Air Force’s requirements,” Rob Toth, vice-president, Strategy and Business Development, Air Mobility and Maritime Missions at Lockheed Martin, said.

“On award of the MTA contract, we will establish a second C-130J-30 production facility in India, in full coordination with the US government,” he added.

He said that “establishing a maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility in India to support the IAF’s existing fleet of 12 C-130J-30s as well as other global Super Hercules fleets is a key priority.” The company and Tata announced the groundbreaking of such a facility in December 2025, he said.

“The Tata joint venture is already the supplier for C-130J-30 empennages, with 265 items delivered to date with over 95 per cent indigenous components,” he added.

Asked about the biggest risk to the programme, Toth said, “The C-130J-30 offers certainty and proven performance.”

“Investing in the C-130J eliminates risk as it is already proven in every operational environment,” he added.

India’s history with the development of the transport aircraft has been through licences. IAF’s base repair depot in Kanpur started assembling the Avro HS-748 after a series of agreements in 1959. The first Indian assembled aircraft took to the skies on November 1, 1961, while Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) took up the manufacture of the aircraft in the 1960s.

“This project took off in 18 months,” recalled Sachdeva. The next milestone in this respect was when the Dornier 228, developed by HAL, was produced under German licence in the 1980s. When cockpits worldwide moved to glass displays, HAL’s team adapted the aircraft. Sachdeva said they “replaced the cockpit with a glass cockpit. We got this capability also.”

Design from scratch has been harder. “Why haven’t we built an aircraft for 70 years? Why couldn’t we build an engine?” he said, adding that it takes money that a young, poor country did not have.

Age is now the main pressure. The Avro was one of the IAF’s lightest transports, the Soviet-made Antonov An-12 filled the middle, and the Ilyushin Il-76 took the heavy lifts. The An-32 turned 40 in 2024, and its service life has been extended. The IAF’s 12 C-130Js are configured for special missions, and the Boeing C-17 arrived in 2013 for heavy lift.

Sachdeva said the new types do not fit the old weight classes neatly. “The air force normally flies three classes: about 5 to 6 tonnes, about 20 tonnes, and 40 and above,” he said.

“The C295 replaces the Avro, and the C-17 and the Il-76 are at the top. The Hercules, however, is for ‘an entirely commando role’, which leaves the middle band without a replacement. That means we have a gap of 20 tonnes,” he said.

The MTA contest is meant to fill that gap in a payload class reported at 18 to 30 tonnes. “That is how the air force is going in for an 18-to-30-tonne class of aircraft,” Sachdeva said.

The IAF has not said when it wants an Indian-built MTA in service. Asked whether the force has a timeline, sources within the IAF would say only that the process had begun. “The process for the MTA has started. It will take its course.”

India signed for 56 C295 aircraft in September 2021, in a deal worth ₹21,935 crore. Sixteen were to come in fly-away condition from Spain, and 40 were to be built at Vadodara by Tata and Airbus. The plant was inaugurated in October 2024, ending state-owned HAL’s monopoly on building aircraft in India.

Sachdeva said the figure of 56 came from the fleet being replaced. “By the time this contract was happening, it was coming as a replacement for the Avros,” he said, and the IAF “had only 56 Avros” when the contract was signed. He called the C295 “a success”, saying the government made local manufacture a condition of the deal.

Local content is the main measure of the programme. Airbus and Tata say more than 85 per cent of the structural and final assembly of the 40 aircraft will be done in India, including 13,000 detail parts, 21 certified special processes and 37 Indian suppliers.

At the time of the deal, the defence secretary said 96 per cent of the work Airbus does at its Spanish facility would be done in India. The two figures measure different things. The 85 per cent covers the structure and final assembly of the 40 aircraft, while the 96 per cent was the defence secretary’s estimate of the work Airbus does at its Spanish facility.

“This project is much more than an assembly line,” said Venkat Katkuri, head of Defence and Space, Airbus India and South Asia.

“We aim to manufacture over 90 per cent of the aircraft structure and are already manufacturing all the electrical harnesses in India from the raw material stage,” he added.

Sachdeva said certification limits what any line can do. “Some components are life-critical, but they are very certified. Those components may not be allowed to be made in India as of now,” he said.

The Vadodara plant is not India’s first involvement in making military transport aircraft. Tata Lockheed Martin Aerostructures, formed in Hyderabad in 2010, makes the tail assembly, or empennage, of the C-130J. It has delivered more than 200 and is the single source for new C-130Js built in the United States. The aircraft are assembled in Georgia, so India already makes parts of a military transport aircraft, but for a line that is located abroad.

“We know how to make world-class wings. We know how to actually use the metallurgy to make those wings,” he said. Two industrial teams have come forward and bids are due on December 2. The C-130J carries about 19 tonnes of weight, and the jet-powered C-390 about 26 tonnes. Mahindra and Embraer signed a memorandum in February 2024 and a strategic cooperation agreement in October 2025.

The Nagpur facility would cover assembly, systems integration, manufacturing engineering and local supply chain development, with Indian firms brought in stages for manufacturing, aftermarket services, training and lifecycle support. Lockheed and Tata said in 2024 that they would set up additional C-130J production and assembly in India if selected.

The IAF’s existing C-130J fleet gives Lockheed the advantage of an incumbent. The larger Airbus A400M is seen as an outsider, and recent reports say Airbus is no longer pursuing the competition. 

Lockheed rejects the idea that payload is a weakness. The C-130J-30 “carries 60 per cent more passengers, 44 per cent more paratroopers, 31 per cent more litter patients and 14 per cent more standard pallets than the closest competition,” the company said in written responses. It added that the version the IAF already flies has a payload of 22,000 kilogram, above the roughly 19 tonnes usually cited for the aircraft. Carrying more people and equipment per sortie, it argues, means fewer flights, faster delivery of forces in a contingency and lower operating costs. How the IAF weighs that against the C-390’s 26 tonnes will shape the contest in the 18-to-30-tonne class.

Scale is Lockheed’s second argument. “Lockheed Martin enjoys an unmatched airlift production scale compared to the competition, with 2,700 aircraft produced versus fewer than two dozen,” the company said. It also pointed to 27 countries that operate the C-130J, and to work already under way in India. Its Tata joint venture is under contract for 40 F-16 wing shipsets, with 74 per cent of the detailed parts made in the country, and deliveries began in 2026. The company said the two joint ventures with Tata are “performing today and are ready to scale toward the future.”

Each plan depends on an order that has not been placed. Nagpur depends on the C-390 being chosen, and Lockheed’s plans depend on the C-130J winning.

Sachdeva reads the foreign interest as a sign of confidence. “This is why so many companies are jumping, because they have seen Tata being a success with the C295.”

“I don’t see a risk now, because the requirement is increasing,” he said, adding that Indian makers do not need the scale of Boeing or Airbus, which are looking for orders of “thousands and thousands every year”. The open question, he said, is “how much the private industry will be able to actually pull it out and take it into the future of the Indian Air Force.”

The British Dakotas of 1947 flew because India had no other option. The new plants in Vadodara and Nagpur are meant to reduce that dependence. Final assembly is the simpler part of the task, since the components for it arrive from elsewhere. The harder question is whether the two plants go on to make the parts and support the aircraft for decades or only put together what others have designed.